God and the English Utilitarians (I)

Dedication

This essay was originally written for Prof.
Kenneth E. Bock's graduate class in the history of social theory (Sociology
201) at the University of California, Berkeley in the Fall of 1983.
I have since revised it based largely on editorial suggestions Bock penciled
in the margins. Now, as then, I thank Ken Bock for this help and
for the privilege of having been his student. To him, as well, is
this paper dedicated.

Mill, John Stuart, "Utilitarianism," in Edwin A. Burtt
(ed.), The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, New York, The
Modern Library, 1939, pp. 895-948.

Willey, Basil, The Eighteenth Century Background;
Studies on the Idea of Nature in the Thought of the Period, New York,
Columbia University Press, 1961 [1940].

Introduction

Exploration for this essay began when
I encountered a "theological" utilitarian, William Paley, in the pages
of Elie Halevy's The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1972), his monumental study of Bentham and the secular utilitarian
movement. Paley, Halevy wrote,
had relied upon the rewards and punishments of the afterlife to
tie up the loose ends of his theological brand of utilitarianism.
I confess to being intrigued by this little discovery — so much so that
it prompted the investigation of a series of interesting questions.
How, for example, could a philosophical system so deliberately secular
as Bentham's utilitarianism nevertheless also include a theological
branch?
What was the link between the secular and theological schools of utilitarianism?
Did they share a common history? And what, specifically, divided
them? I wondered most of all whether my "discovery" of theological
utilitarianism meant that secular utilitarians might not have been quite
as thoroughly secular as they or we were accustomed to believe — and,
indeed, whether the secularization of modern social theory in general has
been quite as complete as sometimes represented.
This last question arises from a simple dilemma. Though Bentham's
utilitarianism may have once appeared as a rigorously atheological body
of conceptual and ethical commitments, a modern eye detects within utilitarianism
the traces of nonsecular purposiveness: utilitarian social theory,
after all, proposed a master goal for human life (happiness) and
from this goal derived preferred social arrangements and a calculus of
virtue. But how, we moderns must ask, could such a human goal (or
any other) be derived or defended from within the framework of a purely
secular philosophical system? How could the happiness goal's authority
be vouchsafed? To the modern eye a rigorously secular view of human
existence is limited to descriptive rather than normative
assertions. How then was Bentham's secular and descriptive is
transformed into the moralist's or the theologian's prescriptive ought?

Bentham's solution to this problem lay in his idea that happiness is
good because men seek it and it is man's nature to do so. Bentham
declared as much in the famous first sentence of his Introduction to
the Principles of Moral Legislation (1789): "Nature has placed
mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and
pleasure." Bentham simply declared that what is is
right because it is natural. Of course, his solution is hedged
about with difficulties. Not all men do pursue happiness or place
it high in their hierarchy of life goals — what of Stoics or ascetics?
Bentham argued that some men merely postponed happiness into the
afterlife — thus indirectly validating his principle. But, and even
so, that some men postponed implies that they possessed, and had exercised,
the choice to seek or not to seek happiness. Thus, though men might universally
prefer happiness, they nevertheless cannot evade responsibility for choosing
or choosing not to pursue it. Moreover, a long and venerated Christian
tradition saw ethics and morality as counterforces
to men's quests
for self-gratification. In this view the pleasure inclination was
as real and as present as in Bentham's utilitarianism, but it implied the
need for control, not ethical validation.

Bentham's argumentation on this point was singularly uncompelling.
He wrote that the inclination toward happiness was so fundamental
in the human character that it could have no proof or validation — and
J.S. Mill (1963) repeated much the same argument more than a half-century
later. Bentham in effect affirmed happiness ex cathedra, and
so was vulnerable to a serious weakness: If we grant Bentham's "argument
from his sense of the fundamental," how shall we know when to reject other,
now faulty, visions of fundamental truths advanced by advocates every bit
as sincere as Bentham?

The closest Bentham came to a justification for happiness's goodness
or ethical warrant is the opening sentence of Introduction (1789).
Bentham was a practical man and cared more about the practical applications
than the intellectual or ethical foundations of his system. The message
of Bentham's famous first sentence was that nature imposes a happiness
orientation on mankind. By implication — though Bentham never spelled
this out — the forces and laws of nature are good and worth following.
But, and once again, on what authority? Nature in the Christian tradition
had long occupied the opposite moral valuation, as Willey (1961, p. 4)
reminds us:

...the physical world, in spite of its divine origin,
was traditionally held to have shared in the fatal consequence of the fall
of man, and to have become the chosen abode of the apostate spirits. Science
in the Middle Ages was largely black magic; Nature was full of pagan divinities
turned devils, and to meddle with it was to risk damnation. Friar
Bacon was imprisoned as a sorcerer, and the Faust story illustrates the
fascinated horror with which, as late as the sixteenth century, the popular
mind regarded scientific knowledge.

Whatever was natural, in other words, was probably bad.
On what authority, then, could Bentham declare the contrary?

As we will see, theological utilitarians shed valuable light on the
happiness principle's ethical foundations. They can provide us with
a revealing perspective on both their own thought and that of their better
remembered secular counterparts.